On the Grand Finale in Samuel Clemenss :: essays papers

On the Grand Finale in Samuel Clemenss Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) not only tells a story in this famous contribution to American literature, he also goes to great length to depict civilized humanity in a light that is anything but glamorous or glorious. In fact, his descriptions of typical representatives of society regarding their motivations, actions, habits, and morals are conveyed with subtlety but with unmistakable critical intentions. The metatextual aspects of this work appear gradually but intensify toward the end until the novel reaches a point where it begins to border on the absurd, a literary aspect explored more fully by later writers, such as playwright Samuel Beckett. Distinct elements of absurdity materialize when Huck Finn searches for Jim, his fellow traveler on the raft, who had been sold as a runaway slave by a con-artist. In the course of this search, Huck stumbles upon the farm of Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas who mistake him for Tom Sawyer. Huck goes along with this mistake, creating a situation that gets compounded when the real Tom Sawyer shows up. The latter, however, volunteers to go along with the ruse by posing first as a stranger and then as his own brother Sid. The novel depicts Huck Finn as a character who learned to stand on his own two feet at an early age and is used to surviving by his wits. He lacks formal education, and it is clear that he likes to view himself as un-"sivilized," but he is smart enough to wiggle himself out of almost any difficulty. His intelligence manifests itself in an uncanny ability to recognize human motivations and shortcomings and to act accordingly. However, he does not exploit people and generally refuses to compromise his own moral code which is fairly strict and amazingly conventional. Tom Sawyer, by comparison, is a well-read boy who clearly represents Clemens's view of the "learned" factions and aspects of society. The picture that emerges when Huck and Tom start to collaborate is one of almost perpetual conflict of the two in their mutual quest of a common objective: the liberation of Jim. Clemens turns this conflict into a tit-for-tat comparison of an "honor" student from the school of hard knocks in the so-called "real world" and his counterpart from the school of human civilization who functions mostly by using knowledge acquired from books.